The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Resistant, Powerful and Extremely Brave Take on Freedom of Expression

When director Mohammad Rasoulof walked down the Cannes Film Festival last year, he was not only there for the success of his film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, but his presence, much like his film, was an act of assertion, a protest, a defiance of the Iranian censorship amidst a huge crackdown on the freedom of expression of Iranian filmmakers under the Ayatollah regime.

Resistant voices from Iran, which has repeatedly been a target of their regimes and, in contemporary times, has been massively tortured by Israel and the United States, stand at the crossroads of suppression but also as symbols of hope in times of despair, intertwined. Cinema becomes the medium where one channels the emotions, however personal, but extremely political, specifically for regions which would not be silent, which will always answer back, which disturb the status quo, in all possible ways. 

Having said this, Rasoulof, who escaped an eight-year-long prison sentence and whose films have repeatedly been targeted by the Iranian regime and Islamic courts in the past, bravely brings his non-conformity with the state, and by extension, all global authoritarian regimes, forward within the highly political and yet domestic atmosphere in which his new thriller, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, operates.

A scene from The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024).

The plot

*Spoilers ahead*

Set against the backdrop of the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) movement in Iran, following the custodial death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the film places Iman's (Missagh Zareh) family at the centre and as a microcosm of Iranian society, its many complexities and issues. 

Within a nuclear family setup, we find Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), Iman's wife, and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), their teenage daughters, all affected by the rising protests within the nation to some extent.

While the young daughters are the most impacted, constantly viewing the situation on their mobile phones, their father can't escape it either, no matter how hard he tries. Now that he is promoted to an investigative judge, he has to sign death sentences against the protesters while also safeguarding himself and his family from any external threat.

A scene from The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024).

The burden is largely borne by the women of the family. The daughters are asked to distance and detach themselves from what is happening around them, and to be “irreproachable”. 

Najmeh, as the moral compass, acts as a mediator between the strict father and the rebel daughters. She provides the daughters with a rulebook, detailing who they can meet, who they can talk to, and ultimately, the donning of hijab (headscarf).

The hijab extends to not just the head-covering but also confinement within the home itself, maintaining the secrecy of the situation from the external world and preserving the reputation and honour of their father in all the ways they possibly can. 

All goes well until the time two disturbing elements enter the picture and trouble the extremely private setting of Iman's family. Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), Rezvan's friend, finds refuge in their home before the protests begin, and when she is hit on the face during a protest later, Iman's most important possession goes missing, i.e, his gun. 

Iman, as the defender of “god's message” and thereby the state, would go to any lengths to find the gun. Unsurprisingly, his first suspect is his family, especially the young girls who are being accustomed to the theocracy of the state and constantly raising their voice for what they believe in. 

What follows are regular arguments within the family, “psychotherapy” sessions, and finally, displacing and moving to Iman's birthplace, in a remote area within the hills, now that danger looms large over his family.

The final segment of the film is the most intense as Iman is, perhaps, the closest to the danger himself, within the confines of the place. His wife and daughters take turns to be blamed for the missing gun until his youngest daughter escapes, only to return and kill him.

On womanhood and desiring ones' subjugation

The film employs a calm setting within the home, in stark contrast to the raw footage and images from the protest sites. The usage of whites and pastel colours rather hints at how innocent every person in the family is, albeit, at the surface level. 

The first intrusion within this innocent space is by Sadaf, whose bruised face is cleaned by Najmeh, and the close-up shot of Najmeh's expressions provides a glimpse into her alternative self, where she as much the product of the state as her young daughters are, where she knows the atrocities of the state being inflicted on the young women, where she is an active participant of her subjugation. 

Almost a four-minute long close-up of their faces, and the audience realises the claustrophobia that the four women feel within the room, with Najmeh constantly oscillating between her womanhood and being an obedient wife to Iman and, by extension, a passive citizen under the authoritarian regime. 

His daughters are not easily brought into the state machinery, and this places Iman in an ironic position. Rezvan is out and loud about her opinions and head-on faces Iman, while Sana is silent, but her silence dared not be mistaken for her submission, neither to the state nor her father. 

The fall of the State and the patriarch

A scene from The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024).

Iman, as the representative of the State, but also a father and a husband, represents the public as well as the private. His actions and anxieties are motivated by the burden that he carries at all times, of being a dutiful statesman and carrying state principles on his sleeves, while at the same time compromising his values and ethics, but still continuing, nonetheless. 

His promotion comes at a heavy cost to his sense of conscience, where the judiciary – a representative of what French philosopher Louis Althusser terms the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) – constantly interpellates him as the subject of the State. Now, Iman, as an active agent of the RSA, must interpellate his daughters, and by extension, all women within the state machinery.

Iman, as an investigative judge, works within this machinery, disciplining the protesters and releasing the code of conduct for reacting to an event like a custodial death, which occurred due to a young woman not covering her head in public. 

Iman, whose primary job is to decide who gets to die and who gets to live among the protesters, can't decide it for himself, towards the end. His fate lies in the hands of one of the daughters and, more importantly, a woman, whom he and his regime have been claiming to safeguard and protect all this time. 

The film becomes public but also deeply personal; it works on the various insecurities of the State as well as the patriarch of a closely-knit family. The gun, when with Iman, sews these insecurities together but fails its most loyal owner towards the end when it goes missing. 

The seed that he and the State sowed on the sacred fig is now out in the world as his daughter, holds the weapon that would bring in the most destruction for them, in the most unimaginable ways. The sacred fig becomes a metaphor for the “law” of the state and the authoritarian regimes of the world which are against women, their lives and their agency of being.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, initially released in September 2024. It received a theatrical release again in January 2025 in India and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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